


a fitful silence

by handschuhmaus



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Identity Issues, character sketch, the assorted nastiness inherent in being Cosinga's son and Plagueis's apprentice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-03
Updated: 2018-04-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 09:24:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13854861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/handschuhmaus/pseuds/handschuhmaus
Summary: The man who is both Sidious and Palpatine wrestles with the question of who he really is, and what Palpatine is.





	a fitful silence

The thing, Sidious thinks, about Palpatine, is that it is all too easy to believe this is him. All too easy to slip into the robes of state and the pleasant--even sweet persona, pretend he can't actually be bothered by the past, and doesn't live a double life.

...and isn't a monstrous wretch more apt to tear out a heart and watch life drain away than to actually maintain a personal relationship.

(Relationships are ...difficult, even, or perhaps especially, for Palpatine.)

Until something happens. Until some minor outer rim senator says something vaguely insulting, and one half of him screams at them internally while the other slips back and forth in a sinus rhythm between maintaining the mask and awareness that this, the kind and mysterious but somewhat savvy Palpatine, is not all he is.

Palpatine is only mysterious, to the public, in a superficial sense: no one is sure quite why he lost the rest of the family in some accident, but that is a private grief which merely makes the politician more relatable. He is not like the spy in the holoseries with a whole other life.

But Sidious is wholly a creature of shadows and gives no hint of who he is, let alone his past. Sidious, as an entity, postdates so much of what was formative (and badly formative) to Palpatine.

The being who is both does not like to think in this way about Sidious, preferring the personal fiction that the monster and the scars of the dark side are in fact his real nature.

Palpatine is, after all, the identity he has worn from birth, even before he shed his first name and his dreadful sire, Cosinga. Yet the character he plays for "Palpatine" gives no hint of that childhood. Palpatine could, probably, love someone, even though he has mostly given up on that, because, after all, even cruel, grasping Cosinga could not accept his firstborn, so there is little hope of his being tolerable. To Damask, the man is a tool, and one which does not deserve its own comfort; it is true that Plagueis recognizes his bestial nature, often hidden as it is, and accepts him, but he has made plain that he requires such a fiend, so it is not a gesture towards a relationship..

Certain people, indeed, readily tolerate Palpatine and even seek his approval. It is pitiful that the queen-elect Nabarrie can be won over by a few kind words, but it is clearly the case. And even a few people whom he uses as agents are seemingly tolerant...and yet that is likely because they are of Cosinga's ilk and now he is useful and knows how to play at concealing his nature.

He dares to wish sometimes, only in his head, that another story he gives away, that of gentle Palpatine and his mentor, the scheming but generous Magister Damask, had more than the semblance of truth and wasn't a rice paper facade. Would that he could have chosen Hego Damask, so much more understanding than the real thing, as his surrogate father. Would that they might play those rules, and, perhaps, Damask one day say "You have done well."

But that is preposterous. Even very early on Naboo, Plagueis had readily pinned him down as heartless and insidious. As he truly is, a thing which belongs to the night and deserves none of the pleasant fictions people maintain as happy families. 

It doesn't stop some part of him, which is very much still a little boy who cannot manage to warrant positive attention from his father, wishing, like the droid in the folk tale, that such a fiction could be true for him. But that is a weakness Sidious cannot have, and he must beat that down deep inside of him, never let it, nor this foolish notion of Palpatine being the truth of him, even as it is the role he must act, rear is head.

After all, he is Lord Sidious and there is the Grand Plan to accomplish.

**Author's Note:**

> "I know, I'm unlovable, you don't have to tell me, message received loud and clear, loud and clear. There's not much in my life; take it, it's yours..."
> 
>  
> 
> ...I've felt that, and it seems like he is here. (It's from The Smiths' "Unlovable")
> 
> Ehn. I'm not super satisfied with this one (not sure where it was going, another fic bleeding into it), but...


End file.
